where past meets future

Tag Archives: David Roden

The ever controversial Steve Fuller has recently published a number of jolting essays at the IEET,(there has been a good discussion on David Roden’s blog on the topic), yet whatever one thinks about the prospect of zombie vs transhumanist apocalypse he has managed to raise serious questions for anyone who identifies themselves with the causes of transhumanism and techno-progressivism; namely, what is the proper role, if any, of the revolutionary, modernizing state in such movements and to what degree should the movement be open to violence as a means to achieve its ends? Both questions, I will argue, can best be answered by looking at the system constructed in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1953 under the reign of Joseph Stalin.

Those familiar with the cast of characters in the early USSR will no doubt wonder why I chose to focus on the “conservative” Stalin rather Leon Trotsky who certainly evidenced something like proto-transhumanism with quotes such as this one in his essay Revolutionary and Socialist Art:

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

It was views like this one that stood as evidence for me of the common view among intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism that it was Trotsky who was the true revolutionary figure and heir of Lenin, whereas Stalin was instead a reactionary in Marxists garb who both murdered the promise latent in the Russian Revolution and constructed on the revolution’s corpse a system of totalitarian terror.

Serious historians no longer hold such views in light of evidence acquired after the opening up of Soviet archives after the USSR’s collapse in 1991. What we’ve gained as a consequence of these documents is a much more nuanced and detailed view of the three major figures of the Russian Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all of which in some ways looked at violence as the premier tool for crafting a new social and political order.

Take the father of the Russian Revolution- Lenin. The common understanding of Lenin in the past was to see him as a revolutionary pragmatist who engaged in widespread terror and advocated dictatorship largely as a consequence of the precarious situation of the revolution and in the atmosphere of danger and bloodshed found in the Russian civil war. In fact the historical record presented in the archives now makes clear that many of the abhorrent features of state communism in Russia once associated with Stalin in fact originated under Lenin, obscenities such as as the forerunner to the KGB, the Cheka, or the Soviet system of concentration camps- Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago. Far from seeing them as temporary expedients in precarious situation of the revolution and the atmosphere of danger and bloodshed found in the Russian civil war, Lenin saw these innovations as a permanent feature of Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which Lenin had reimagined as the permanent rule of a revolutionary, technocratic elite.

Trotsky comes off only a little better because he never assumed the mantle of Soviet dictator. Trotsky’s problems, however, originate from his incredible egotism when combined with his stunning political naivete. His idea was that in the 1920’s conditions were ripe to export the communist revolution globally barely grasping just how precarious the situation was for the newly victorious communist revolutionaries within even his own country. Indeed, to the extent that both domestic communist in non-Russian countries identified with Soviet communism and prematurely pushed their societies towards revolution this only ended up in empowering reactionaries and leading to the rise of fascist parties globally who would come quite close to strangling the infant of state communism while it was still in its cradle.

Then there’s Stalin who those sympathetic to communism often see as the figure who did the most to destroy its’ promise. The so-called “man of steel” is understood as a reactionary monster who replaced the idealism of the early Soviet Union with all the snakes that had infected czarist Russia’s head.

This claim too has now been upended. For what is clear is that although Stalin reoriented the USSR away from Trotsky’s dream of world revolution to focus on “socialism in one country” the state Stalin managed to create was perhaps the most radical and revolutionary the world has yet seen.

The state has always played a large role in modernization, but it was only in the types of communists regimes which Stalin was the first to envision that the state became synonymous with modernization itself. And it wasn’t only modernization, but a kind of ever accelerating modernization that aimed to break free of the gravity of history and bring humanity to a new world inhabited by a new type of man.

It was his revolutionary impatience and desire to accelerate the pace of history that led Stalin down the path to being perhaps the most bloody tyrant the world has yet know. The collectivization of Soviet agriculture alone coming at the cost of at least 5 million deaths. What Stalin seemed to possess that his fellow revolutionaries lacked was a kind of sociopathy that left him flinch-less in the face of mass suffering, though he also became possessed by the paranoia to which tyrants are prone and towards the end of his reign killed as much out of fear as he did as a consequence of his desire to propel the USSR through history.

Here I return to Fuller who seems to have been inspired by state communism and appears to be making the case that what transhumanism needs is a revolutionary vanguard that will, violently if necessary, push society towards transformative levels of technological change. Such change will then make possible the arrival of a new form of human being.

There is a great deal of similarity here with the view of the state as presented by Zoltan Istvan in his novel The Transhumanist Wager though that work is somewhat politically schizophrenic with elements of Ayn Rand and Bolshevism at the same time, which perhaps makes sense given that the Silicon Valley culture it emerged from was largely built on government subsidies yet clings to the illusion it is the product of heroic individuals such as Steve Jobs. And of course, The Transhumanist Wager exhibits this same feature of believing violence necessary to open up the path to radical transformation.

One of the important questions we might ask is how analogous was the Russian situation with our own? What the Soviets were trying to do was to transform their society in a way that had been technologically experienced elsewhere only under a brand new form of political regime. In other words the technological transformation – industrialization- was already understood, where the Soviets were innovative was in the political sphere. At the same time, modernization to be accomplished in the Soviet Union needed to overthrow and uproot traditional social forces that had aligned themselves against industrialization- the nobility and the clergy. A strong state was necessary to overcome powerful and intransigent classes.

None of these characteristics seem applicable the kinds of technological change taking place today. For one, the type of complete technological transformation Fuller is talking about are occurring everywhere nearly simultaneously- say the current revolutions in biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence where no society has achieved some sort of clear breakout that a revolutionary movement is necessary to push society in the direction of replicating.

Nor does the question of technological transformation break clearly along class or even religious lines in a world where the right to left political spectrum remains very much intact. It is highly unlikely that a technological movement on the right will emerge that can remain viable while jettisoning those adhering to more traditional religious notions.

Likewise, it is improbable that any left wing technological movement would abandon its commitment to the UN Declaration and the world’s poor. In thinking otherwise I believe Fuller is repeating Trotsky’s mistake- naively believing in political forces and realignments about to surface that simply aren’t there. (The same applies to Zoltan Istvan’s efforts.)

Yet by far the worst mistake Fuller makes is in embracing the Stalinist idea that acceleration needs to be politicized and that violence is a useful tool in achieving this acceleration. The danger here is not that justifying violence in the pursuit of transhumanist ends is likely to result in widespread collective violence in the name of such goals, but that it might start to attract sadists and kooks whose random acts of violence “in the name of transhumanism” put the otherwise humane goals of the movement at risk of social backlash.

At the same time Fuller is repeating the grave error of Stalinism which is to conflate power and the state with the process of technological transformation. The state is many and sometimes contradictory things with one of its’ roles indeed to modernize society. Yet at the same time the state is tasked with protecting us from that very same modernization by preventing us from being treated as mere parts in a machine rather than as individuals and citizens.

Fuller also repeats the error of the Stalinist state when it comes to the role and efficacy of violence in the political sphere for the proper role of violence is not as a creative force that is able to establish something new, but as a means of resistance and protection for those already bound together in some mutual alliance.

Still, we might want to take seriously the possibility that Fuller has tapped into a longer term trend in which the ways technology is developing is opening up the possibility of the reappearance of the Stalinist state, but that’s a subject that will have to await for another time.

So let’s take an earnest look at Bakker’s alien philosophy…well, not just yet. Before I begin it’s necessary to lay out a very basic version of the philosophical perspective Bakker is coming from, for in a way his real goal is to use some of our common intuitions regarding humanoid aliens as a way of putting flesh on the bones of two often misunderstood and not (at least among philosophers) widely held philosophical positions- eliminativism and Blind Brain Theory, both of which, to my lights at least, could be consumed under one version of the ominous and cool sounding, philosophy of Dark Phenomenology. Though once you get a handle of on dark phenomenology it won’t seem all that ominous, and if it’s cool, it’s not the type of cool that James Dean or the Fonz before season 5 would have recognized.

Eliminativism, if I understand it, is the full recognition of the fact that perhaps all our notions about human mental life are suspect in so far as they have not been given a full scientific explanation. In a sense, then, eliminativism is merely an extension of the materialization (some would call it dis-enchantment) that has been going on since the scientific revolution.

Most of us no longer believe in angels, demons or fairies, not to mention quasi-scientific ideas that have ultimately proven to be empty of content like the ether or phlogiston. Yet in those areas where science has yet to reach, especially areas that concern human thinking and emotion, we continue to cling to what strict eliminativists believe are likely to be proved similar fictions, a form of myth that can range from categories of mental disease without much empirical substance to more philosophical and religiously determined beliefs such as those in free will, intentionality and the self.

I think Bakker is attracted to eliminativism because it allows us to cut the gordian knot of problems that have remained unresolved since the beginning of Western philosophy itself. Problems built around assumptions which seem to be increasingly brought into question in light of our increasing knowledge of the actual workings of the human brain rather than our mere introspection regarding the nature of mental life. Indeed, a kind of subset of eliminativism in the form Blind Brain Theory essentially consists in the acknowledgement that the brain was designed for a certain kind of blindness by evolution.

What was not necessary for survival has been made largely invisible to the brain without great effort to see what has not been revealed. Philosophy’s mistake from the standpoint of a proponent of Blind Brain Theory has always been to try to shed light upon this darkness from introspection alone- a Sisyphean tasks in which the philosopher if not made ridiculous becomes hopelessly lost in the dark labyrinth of the human imagination. In contrast an actually achievable role for philosophy would be to define the boundary of the unknown until the science necessary to study this realm has matured enough for its’ investigations to begin.

The problem becomes what can one possibly add to the philosophical discourse once one has taken an eliminativists/Blind Brain position? Enter the aliens, for Bakker manages to make a very reasonable argument that we can use both to give us a plausible picture of what the mental life and philosophy of intelligent “humanoid” aliens might look like.

In terms of understanding the minds of aliens eliminativism and Blind Brain Theory are like addendums to evolutionary psychology. An understanding of the perceptual limitations of our aliens- not just mental limitations, but limitations brought about by conditions of time and space should allow us to make reasonable guesses about not only the philosophical questions, but the philosophical errors likely to be made by our intelligent aliens.

In a way the application of eliminativism and BBT to intelligent aliens put me in mind of Isaac Asimov’s short story Nightfall in which a world bathed in perpetual light is destroyed when it succumbs to the fall of night. There it is not the evolved limitations of the senses that prevent Asimov’s “aliens” from perceiving darkness but their being on a planet that orbits two suns and keep them bathed in an unending day.

I certainly agree with Bakker that there is something pregnant and extremely useful in both eliminativism and Blind Brain Theory, though perhaps not so much it terms of understanding the possibility space of “alien intelligence” as in understanding our own intelligence and the way it has unfolded and developed over time and has been embedded in a particular spatio-temporal order we have only recently gained the power to see beyond.

Nevertheless, I think there are limitations to the model. After all, it isn’t even clear the extent to which the kinds of philosophical problems that capture the attention of intelligence are the same even across our own species. How are we to explain the differences in the primary questions that obsess, say, Western versus Chinese philosophy? Surely, something beyond neurobiology and spatial-temporal location is necessary to understand the the development of human philosophy in its various schools and cultural guises including how a discourse has unfolded historically and the degree to which it has been supported by the powers and techniques to secure the survival of some question/perspective over long stretches of time.

There is another way in which the use of eliminativism or Blind Brain Theory might lead us astray when it come to thinking about alien intelligence- it just isn’t weird enough.When the story of the development of not just human intelligence, but especially our technological/scientific civilization is told in full detail it seems so contingent as to be quite unlikely to repeat itself. The big question I think to ask is what are the possible alternative paths to intelligence of a human degree or greater and to technological civilization like or more advanced than our own. These, of course, are questions for speculative philosophy and fiction that can be scientifically informed in some way, but are very unlikely to be scientifically answered. And if if we could discover the very distant technological artifacts of another technological civilization as the new Milner/Hawking project hopes there remains no way to reverse engineer our way to understand the lost “philosophical” questions that would have once obsessed the biological “seeds” of such a civilization.

Then again, we might at least come up with some well founded theories though not from direct contact or investigation of alien intelligence itself. Our studies of biology are already leading to alternative understanding of the way intelligence can be embeded say with the amazing cephalopods. As our capacity from biological engineering increases we will be able make models of, map alternative histories for, and even create alternative forms of living intelligence. Indeed, our current development of artificial intelligence is like an enormous applied experiment in an alternative form of intelligence to our own.

What we might hope is that such alternative forms of intelligence not only allow us to glimpse the limits of our own perception and pattern making, but might even allow us to peer into something deeper and more enchanted and mystical beyond. We might hope even more deeply that in the far future something of the existential questions that have obsessed us will still be there like fossils in our posthuman progeny.

Back in the late winter I wrote a review of the biologist Edward O. Wilson’s grandiloquently mistitled tract- TheMeaning of Human Existence. As far as visions of the future go Wilson’s was a real snoozer, although for that very reason it left little to be nervous about. The hope that he articulated in his book being that we somehow manage to keep humanity pretty much the same- genetically at least- “as a sacred trust”, in perpetuity. It’s a bio-conservatism that, on one level, I certainly understand, but one I also find incredibly unlikely given that the future consists of….well…. an awfully long stretch of time (that is as long as we’re wise enough or just plain lucky ). How in the world can we expect, especially in light of current advances in fields like genetics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence etc, that we can, or even should, keep humanity essentially unchanged not just now, but for 100 years, or 1000s year, 10,000s years, or even longer?

If Wilson is the 21st century’s prince of the dull future the philosopher David Roden should perhaps be crowned the king of weird one(s). Indeed, it may be that the primary point of his recent mind-bending book Posthuman Life:Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, is to make the case for the strange and unexpected. The Speculative Posthumanism (SP) he helps launch with this book a philosophy that grapples with the possibility that the future of our species and its descendents will be far weirder than we have so far allowed ourselves to imagine.

I suppose the best place to begin a proper discussion of Posthuman Life would be with explaining just exactly what Roden means by Speculative Posthumanism, something that (as John Dahaner has pointed out) Roden manages to uncover like a palimpsest by providing some very useful clarifications for often philosophically confused and conflated areas of speculation regarding humanity’s place in nature and its future.

Essentially Roden sees four domains of thought regarding humanism/posthumanism. There is Humanism of the old fashioned type that even absent some kind of spiritual dimension makes the claim that there is something special, cognitively, morally, etc that marks human beings off from the rest of nature.

Interestingly, Roden sees Transhumanism as merely an updating of this humanism- the expansion of its’ tool kit for perfecting humankind to include not just things like training and education but physical, cognitive, and moral enhancements made available by advances in medicine, genetics, bio-electronics and similar technologies.

Then there is Critical Posthumanism by which Roden means a move in Western philosophy apparent since the later half of the 20th century that seeks to challenge the anthropocentrism at the heart of Western thinking. The shining example of this move was the work of Descartes, which reduced animals to machines while treating the human intellect as mere “spirit” as embodied and tangible as a burnt offering to the gods. Critical Posthumanism, among whom one can count a number of deconstructionists, feminists, multicultural, animal rights, and environmentalists philosophers from the last century, aims to challenge the centrality of the subject and the discourses surrounding the idea of an observer located at some Archimedean point outside of nature and society.

Lastly, there is the philosophy Roden himself hopes to help create- Speculative Posthumanism the goal of which is to expand and explore the potential boundaries of what he calls the posthuman possibility space (PPS). It is a posthumanism that embraces the “weird” in the sense that it hopes, like critical posthumanism, to challenge the hold anthropocentrism has had on the way we think about possible manifestations of phenomenology, moral reasoning, and cognition. Yet unlike Critical Posthumanism, Speculative Posthumanism does not stop at scepticism but seeks to imagine, in so far as it is possible, what non-anthropocentric forms of phenomenology, moral reasoning, and cognition might actually look like. (21)

Roden challenges the notion that any potential moral agents of the future that can trace their line of descent back to humanity will be something like Kantian moral agents rather than agents possessing a moral orientation we simply cannot imagine. He also manages to point towards connections of the postmodern thrust of late 21st century philosophy which challenged the role of the self/subject and recent developments in neuroscience, including connections between philosophical phenomenology and the neuroscience of human perception that do something very similar to our conception of the self. Indeed, Posthuman Life eclipses similar efforts at synthesis and Roden excels at bringing to light potentially pregnant connections between thinkers as diverse as Andy Clark and Heidegger, Donna Haraway and Deleuze and Derrida along with non-philosophical figures like the novelist Philip K. Dick.

It is as a very consequence of his success at philosophical clarification that leads Roden across what I, at least, felt was a bridge (philosophically) too far. As posthumanist philosophers are well aware, the very notion of the “human” suffers a continuum problem. Unique to us alone, it is almost impossible to separate humanity from technology broadly defined and this is the case even if we go back to the very beginnings of the species where the technologies in question are the atul or the baby sling. We are in the words of Andy Clark “natural born cyborgs”. In addition to this is the fact that (like anything bound up with historical change) how a human being is defined is a moving target rather than a reflection of any unchanging essence.

How then can one declare any possible human future that emerges out of our continuing “technogenesis” “post” human, rather than just the latest iteration of what in fact is the very old story of the human “artificial ape”? And this status of mere continuation (rather than break with the past) would seem to hold in a philosophical sense even if whatever posthumans emerged bore no genetic and only a techno-historical relationship to biological humans. This somewhat different philosophical problem of clarification again emerges as the consequence of another continuum problem namely the fact that human beings are inseparable from the techno-historical world around them- what Roden brilliantly calls “the Wide Human” (WH).

It is largely out of the effort to find clear boundaries within this confusing continuum that leads Roden to postulate what he calls the “disconnection thesis”. According to this thesis an entity can only properly be said to be posthuman if it is no longer contained within the Wide Human. A “Wide Human descendent is a posthuman if and only if:”

It has ceased to belong to WH (the Wide Human) as a result of technical alteration.

Or is wide descendent of such a being. (outside WH) . (112)

Yet it isn’t clear, to me at least, why disconnection from the Wide Human is more likely to result in something more different from humanity and our civilization as they currently exist today than anything that could emerge out of, but still remain part of, the Wide Human itself. Roden turns to the idea of “assemblages” developed by Deleuze and Guattari in an attempt to conceptualize how such a disconnection might occur, but his idea is perhaps conceptually clearer if one comes at it from the perspective of the kinds of evolutionary drift that occurs when some set of creatures becomes isolated from another by having become an island.

As Darwin realized while on his journey to the Galapagos isolation can lead quite rapidly to wide differences between the isolated variant and its parent species. The problem when applying such isolation analogies to technological development is that unlike biological evolution (or technological development before the modern era), the evolution of technology is now globally distributed, rapid and continuous.

Something truly disruptive seems much more likely to emerge from within the Wide Human than from some separate entity or enclave- even one located far out in space. At the very least because the Wide Human possesses the kind of leverage that could turn something disruptive into something transformative to the extent it could be characterized as posthuman.

What I think we should look out for in terms of the kinds of weird divergence from current humanity that Roden is contemplating, and though he claims speculative posthumanism is not normative, is perhaps rooting for, is maybe something more akin to a phase change or the kinds of rapid evolutionary changes seen in events like the cambrian explosion or the opening up of whole new evolutionary theaters such as when life in the sea first moved unto the land than some sort of separation. It would be something like the singularity predicted by Vernor Vinge though might just as likely come from a direction completely unanticipated and cause a transformation that would make the world, from our current perspective, unrecognizable, and indeed, weird.

Still, what real posthuman weirdness would seem to require would be something clearly identified by Roden and not dependent, to my lights, on his disruption thesis being true. The same reality that would make whatever follows humanity truly weird would be that which allowed alien intelligence to be truly weird; namely, that the kinds of cognition, logic, mathematics, science found in our current civilization, or the kinds of biology and social organization we ourselves possess to all be contingent. What that would mean in essence was that there were a multitude of ways intelligence and technological civilizations might manifest themselves of which we were only a single type, and by no means the most interesting one. Life itself might be like that with the earthly variety and its conditions just one example of what is possible, or it might not.

The existence of alien intelligence and technology very different from our own means we are not in the grip of any deterministic developmental process and that alternative developmental paths are available. So far, we have no evidence one way or another, though unlike Kant who used aliens as a trope to defend a certain versions of what intelligence and morality means we might instead imagine both extraterrestrial and earthly alternatives to our own.

While I can certainly imagine what alternative, and from our view, weird forms of cognition might look like- for example the kinds of distributed intelligence found in a cephalopod or eusocial insect colony, it is much more difficult for me to conceive what morality and ethics might look like if divorced from our own peculiar hybrid of social existence and individual consciousness (the very features Wilson, perhaps rightfully, hopes we will preserve). For me at least one side of what Roden calls dark phenomenology is a much deeper shade of black.

What is especially difficult in this regard for me to imagine is how the kinds of openness to alternative developmental paths that Roden, at the very least, wants us to refrain from preemptively aborting is compatible with a host of other projects surrounding our relationship to emerging technology which I find extremely important: projects such as subjecting technology to stricter, democratically established ethical constraints, including engineering moral philosophy into machines themselves as the basis for ethical decision making autonomous from human beings. Nor is it clear what guidance Roden’s speculative posthumanism provides when it comes to the question of how to regulate against existential risks, dangers which our failure to tackle will foreclose not only a human future but very likely possibility of a posthuman future.

Roden seems to think the fact that there is no such thing as a human “essence” we should be free to engender whatever types of posthumans we want. As I see it this kind of ahistoricism is akin to a parent who refuses to use the lessons learned from a difficult youth to inform his own parenting. Despite the pessimism of some, humanity has actually made great moral strides over the arc of its history and should certainly use those lessons to inform whatever posthumans we chose to create.

One would think the types of posthumans whose creation we permit should be constrained by our experience of a world ill designed by the God of Job. How much suffering is truly necessary? Certainly less than sapient creatures currently experience and thus any posthumans should suffer less than ourselves. We must be alert to and take precautions to avoid the danger that posthuman weirdness will emerge from those areas of the Wide Human where the greatest resources are devoted- military or corporate competition- and for that reason- be terrifying.

Yet the fact that Roden has left one with questions should not subtract from what he has accomplished; namely he has provided us with a framework in which much of modern philosophy can be used to inform the unprecedented questions that are facing as a result of emerging technologies. Roden has also managed to put a very important bug in the ear of all those who would move too quick to prohibit technologies that have the potential to prove disruptive, or close the door to the majority of the hopefully very long future in front of us and our descendents- that in too great an effort to preserve the contingent reality of what we currently are we risk preventing the appearance of something infinitely more brilliant in our future.